Image © Jonglez Publishing
Nothing quite sucks the charm out of a holiday like a substandard hotel room. It's not just fusty, flock-wallpapered joints, with their lingering smell of boiled meat, that fail to satisfy. Soulless chain hotels, those stacks of production-line cubicles, clash just as badly with the away-from-work mood.
Thank heavens, then, for hotel-obsessives such as Steve Dobson, one of the founders of the Unusual Hotels of the World website. In his new book, Unusual Hotels of the UK & Ireland (available from bookshops and online at GoUnusual.com; rrp £13.99), Dobson goes beyond boring bedrooms and corporate sleep farms to identify 99 hotels, B&Bs and holiday lets where you can wake up with a story to share with friends.
From a treehouse nestled in a huge chestnut to a scary-looking former prison, from the ultra-decadent Crazy Bear Hotel to a gothic temple and a British safari park, here's a taste of Dobson's choice of the oddest (but most alluring) hotels in Ireland and the UK.
